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| Generated by Google Gemini text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 2 |
Weaver stepped towards Misha Collins, who looked at her with some level of
familiarity, suggesting that he had been here before, or had at least seen
her somewhere. He wasn’t shocked or scared, but more annoyed. She reached
out to shake his hand, but pulled it away before he could reach back.
“Sorry. First. Do you know who we are?”
“You’re Holly Blue, Goswin Montagne, Eight Point Seven Point Two, and Briar.
I never learned his last name.”
“Have you been to this location before?” Weaver pressed.
Misha looked around. “Yes. About a month ago.”
“I wish I knew which kind of month we’re talking about,” Weaver muttered to
herself. That is, had it also been three months in the Ediacaran period?
Understanding whether the disparate time periods were somehow linked to one
another could help prevent this from happening again. She reached her hand
out once more, but pulled back yet again at the last second. “Sorry, do you
like...salmon?”
“I suppose I do, as much as anyone,” Misha said, confused.
“I didn’t say salmon,” Weaver tried to clarify, “I said salmon.” This
was a test of sorts. When a time traveler encountered someone whose
understanding of time was in question, pointedly asking them whether they
liked salmon should indicate at least a baseline. If they thought that they
were only talking about the actual fish, they probably didn’t know anything,
or perhaps just not very much.
“I’m sorry, I don’t hear the difference,” Misha admitted. He was a human,
and while this obviously wasn’t his first time around the block, other
shifted selves of this group had so far kept him pretty well in the dark
about the details.
“Holly Blue,” she echoed, finally shaking his hand, “but you can call me
Weaver.”
“You can call me Castiel, if you want. A lot of people prefer it.”
“We need to get you home, Mister Collins,” Goswin said, also stepping
forward. “If you’ve met others like us, and returned home, then they must
have figured out how to do it.”
“They just surrounded me in a circle, closed their eyes, and then I was
home.”
“That’s all it was?” Eight Point Seven asked.
“Oh.” Misha pointed to Weaver. “You tapped something on this refrigerator,
and said something about a bubble.”
“I don’t know how he got through the bubble in the first place,” Weaver
began, “but we’ll probably have to drop it to send him back. It would be the
only safe way to do it. But we should be quick. We never know when other
shifted selves will show up. We could have just missed the group that came
before us. Measuring time is difficult. I don’t even keep a clock in here,
except for my special watch. I may have left it somewhere...”
“Do what you gotta do,” Goswin requested. “Let’s make this quick. We’ll try
to send him back where he belongs, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll just go
with him.”
“Wait, there was one more thing,” Misha remembered. “You gave me this.” He
knelt down and pulled something off of his shoelace aglet, handing it to
Weaver.
She inspected it. “This is a temporal tracker. She probably used it to make
sure that you were returned to where you belonged, instead of Belgium, or
something. You weren’t meant to keep it; that’s why you were able to break
through the bubble.”
“I must have missed that part,” Misha said. “I was looking at the sea
cucumber.”
Weaver looked over at the glass. “That’s not a cucumber. What was the date?”
“The first time it happened was January 11, 2011,” Misha answered. “This
time, it was February 25.”
She handed him the tracker back. “All right. Wait thirty minutes, and then
step on it. I mean exactly thirty minutes. Set your watch to it.”
“I understand,” Misha promised.
“Okay.” Weaver went over to the refrigerator, and started tapping on the
screen. Blast doors dropped down over the glass, to block the view of the
water, and its sea creatures. She kept tapping on it, causing the space
around them to shimmer, implying that the temporal bubble was now down. They
all felt a small lurch in their stomachs as a result. Still, Weaver kept
tapping on the fridge. They started to hear a persistent beep from down the
hallway, the exact source of which was not clear.
“I think your smoke detector needs a new battery,” Misha guessed.
“It’s fine, we like fire,” Weaver said oddly. “You heard the man. Let’s put
him in a circle.” They all came together, and held hands, even Briar, who
wanted to fix this just as much as the rest of them.
Goswin was the captain here, and even though Weaver knew a lot more about
this stuff, he needed to step on up. “We’re trying to get our new friend
here back to February 25, 2011. February 25 in...”
“Vancouver. You don’t need to know my exact address; anywhere there is
fine.”
“Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada,” Goswin said. “Everyone think about
that, and nothing else.”
They shut their eyes instinctually, and focused on the goal. None of them
wanted to open their eyes for fear of breaking concentration, but success
was fairly obvious when they felt a short burst of wind, and heard the flap
of wings. They each peeked with one eye, and found there to only be three
others in the room. Weaver checked the tracker output on the fridge. “He’s
home.”
“What’s to stop it from happening again?” Goswin asked. “It happened once
before, it could happen a third time, and more, and nothing can stop it.”
“You hear that beeping noise?” Weaver posed.
“Yeah?” Briar answered in the form of a question.
Weaver sucked her teeth a little. “We should go. Oh, there’s my watch.”
They climbed out of the bunker, and back onto the surface. One set of their
shifted selves was standing out there already, with their version of Weaver
trying to unlock the door using the secret boulder switch. “Weaver!One,” she
acknowledged with a nod of her head.
“Weaver!Two,” the first Weaver replied.
“Self-destruct?”
“Had to be done.”
“How long?”
Weaver!One looked back at the steps as the hatch was closing up. “It’s soon
enough. We should all go.”
“We came here for a reason,” the other Briar pointed out.
“The cons outweigh the pros,” Weaver!One tried to explain. “Now hustle off.
Don’t let us get mixed up with each other.”
When Weaver!One tried to walk away, Weaver!Two took her by the arm. “Don’t
go back to the Nucleus.” Her eyes darted over to the first Goswin. “One of
them has taken his job a little too seriously. We barely escaped.”
“One of the Goswins?” Weaver!One asked.
“Just don’t go to the Nucleus,” she reiterated. “At least one group ended up
on Dardius, where they were forced to watch some bizarre propaganda films.
They’re taking the Reality Wars very seriously, they think we should join,
and they have a way of keeping us from shifting away.” She didn’t say
anything more about it.
The two groups separated from each other, and disappeared. At least that was
what presumably happened. The first version of the crew leapt away first,
leaving the newcomers’ fates in question. Perhaps they would go down into
the bunker, halt the self-destruct sequence, and start the whole cycle over
again. Misha Collins could spend the rest of his life being shifted back and
forth to the Ediacaran period, altering future events irrevocably. It was
possible that every other Weaver or Holly Blue who took her copy of the crew
to that place inevitably made the same choice to destroy it, only for her
plan to be unknowingly thwarted by the next copy. Time and reality were now
defined by chaos. That was only meant to be the expected end state of the
universe, not the beginning of it, nor the middle.
“This is where you grew up?” Eight Point Seven asked. They were standing by
a pond in the middle of a small field, with a forest all around them.
“Monarch, Belgium,” Goswin confirmed. “Population: zero.”
“Your family was the only one here?” Eight Point Seven continued the
interview.
“There were others...until the very end. In the late 21st century, when they
started erecting all the arcological megastructures, of course most people
eventually moved to them, or they wouldn’t have been successful. It was the
rewilding effort that did it. As antienvironmentalists started to be turned
over to death, it became easier and easier to convince people that giving
the land back to nature was the only ethical choice given our technological
ability to accomplish it. They left their homes, and made new ones. The
cities disappeared, both in name, and in infrastructure. I believe they used
to call this Ghent. Ghent didn’t get an arcology. The nearest one is closer
to where Antwerp was.”
“Yet some people didn’t do that?”
“The megatowers are more environmentally friendly for sustaining the massive
population of the whole planet, but it’s okay if a few choose other methods.
North America had their circles, and we had our villages. We lived in
arcologies too, just not gigantic ones. We lived on the land, but we didn’t
live off of it, instead importing produce from vertical farms. That
was my job for a time, pulling the cart of food by bicycle. That’s all I
did; just pedaled back and forth from the village to the arc.” He stared at
the pond. “Over and over and over and over and over again.” He paused for a
few moments. “I got tired of the monotony, so I left. I had studied both
history and futurology, so I knew that the villages would die out too. It
was only a matter of time before kids like me decided that there were more
social options in the towers. I won’t get into how I moved up to become the
Futurology Administrator of the whole world, but...I’ll never forget where I
came from. This is where my mother died. She wasn’t transhuman, so she
only lived for 74 years. My dad underwent some treatments, but he stopped
them for her. Unfortunately, I guess, it was too little too late. He still
outlived her by 21 years. But not here. After the second to last person left
Monarch, he left too, and moved into my cluster in the arc.”
Goswin looked up as if just remembering that he was talking to other people.
“For those of you who don’t know, the arcologies are modular. Each unit is
the same size, and comes with a baseline configuration, which includes a
bathroom. It can be turned into a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, a
bedroom, or even a simulacrum of an outdoor space, among other variations.
And they can be moved around, so he didn’t move into my cluster of units so
much as they literally picked up my one unit, and flew it down to another
slot; one that had empty units next to it, which we began to occupy
together.”
“Where are we in the timeline?” Eight Point Seven asked him. “Are you still
on Earth? Is your father?”
Goswin took a deep breath, and twisted Weaver’s wrist, which sported a watch
that always told her the time, even when she traveled through it in the
wrong direction, or at the wrong speed. “We were very precise with this
jump. My younger self left with my dad fifteen minutes ago. We just had my
mother’s burial ceremony.”
“Where’s her grave?” Briar asked.
Goswin actually smiled. “Over here.” He led them down the path a ways.
“Monarch butterflies,” Eight Point Seven pointed out as a few of them began
to land on her arms and head.
“Our namesake,” Goswin explained. “Like I was saying, they gave all this
back to nature, but they didn’t just let it grow on its own. They planted
things on purpose according to a very well thought out ecology algorithm,
generated by an entity such as yourself. They decided that Belgium would do
well with milkweed, and with milkweed comes Monarch butterflies.” He
continued through the trees until coming to another clearing. A gravestone
marked the spot where his mother was laid to rest, but it wasn’t altogether
necessary. A swarm of monarchs were keeping watch over it.
“It’s beautiful,” Briar couldn’t help but say. He was starting to relax into
himself.
“We can’t stay,” Weaver said with a sigh. “We have to go back to the
Nucleus.”
Goswin nodded gently, though no one was looking at him; they were still
watching the monarchs flutter about. “I know,” he whispered.
“You heard?”
“I may look like a regular human, but I have excellent hearing.”
“Are you prepared to meet your possibly evil self?”
He took a beat, but then answered confidently with, “yes.”
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